ABSTRACT
In modifying the functionalist approach, writers like Davis, Yinger and O’Dea introduced the idea that religion is, among other things, a provider of meaning in the face of what threatens to be a meaningless world. Even more than in these contributions, the key claim of other recent analyses of religion has, in fact, usually been that religion is in essence a response to the threat of meaninglessness in human life and an attempt to see the world as a meaningfully ordered reality. In Chapter 14 the ideas of the most prominent of such theorists will be examined. However, among earlier theorists, Max Weber to a considerable extent anticipated and laid the groundwork for such an approach and for the synthesis of the various strands from which the religious life is woven.
